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Matthew Vella
Three out of every four arraignments for sexual harassment and corruption of minors last year resulted in judges and magistrates meting out suspended sentences for perpetrators found guilty of abusing children as young as 10.
In nine out of 12 cases in 2005 involving accusations of sexual harassment, corruption of minors, and violent and indecent assault, the Maltese justice system failed to send child abusers to prison, instead letting off the accused with suspended sentences, or supervision under a probation officer.
In the case of the corruption of a minor of 10, the accused was handed a two-year prison sentence suspended for four years. Another case involving violent and indecent assault on an 11-year-old resulted in six-month probation sentence for the accused.
In a case of the corruption of two minors aged 14 and 17, the accused was sentenced to a four-year suspended sentence under the supervision of a probation officer. Another found guilty of corrupting a 17-year-old was sentenced to three years under probation.
Even in the cases where those found guilty are sent to prison, not all sentences seem to send a clear message of a justice system that is serious on child abusers: a person found guilty of corrupting a 13-year-old was sentenced to just six months.
Paedophilia was back under the spotlight in a case involving a Malta Football Association (MFA) groundsman at Pace Grasso ground in Paola, convicted for defiling a 13-year-old boy. He was given a two-year jail term, suspended for four years.
The MFA provided a baffling reaction over pressure to terminate employment of the 79-year-old groundsman, by declaring the ground would not be accessible to schoolchildren attending the Guzé D’Amato School which used the ground.
The MFA instead accused the CEO of the Foundation for Social Welfare Services, Joe Gerada, of a “cheap propaganda campaign” for deciding to go public after weeks of trying to persuade the association, behind the scenes, to let go of the groundsman.
The association’s shocking reaction was to say it would leave it up to the public to conclude whether, “in a long life, if someone is found guilty only once of corrupting a minor, one should be labelled a paedophile”.
Children’s Commissioner Sonia Camilleri has called for the issue to be dealt with decisively.
Earlier last week another lenient sentence was handed down to a 65-year-old minibus driver for violent indecent assault on a 12-year-old girl he had picked up to take to school.
And in a case of a 27-year-old Madliena man admitting to the possession of child pornographic material, the accused was given a six-month jail term suspended for a year and fined Lm100.
Magistrate Miriam Hayman also ordered that the man’s name not to be published by court order, a bone of contention for journalists opposed to proposals by the Ministry for Justice and Home Affairs to impose tighter restrictions on the publication of the names of court witnesses and the accused.
The White Paper ‘Towards a Better and More Expeditious Administration of Justice’ proposes that the law itself should indicate the cases where all the names should be divulged, instead of specifying the exceptions when names should be withheld.
It effectively retracts the right of the press to report a wider range of court cases, as well as establishing the penalties for breaching court bans.
The document argues that accused persons in yet undecided cases risk losing their job, or in the case of a profession, a reduction in their client base – a clause that has been interpreted as placing businesspeople facing criminal charges in special consideration within the proposed reforms.
“Nor is it a rare case in this country that there be also domestic consequences, with legal separations and inter-personal difficulties,” the White Paper reads, stating that the divulging of the name of the accused person and other people involved means witnesses and victims “find themselves on everybody’s tongue with the consequence that they go through a further abuse of malicious gossip, calumnious accusations and sometimes also moral threats without there even being a court judgement against them. In these cases delay means a long road of moral torture to which there exists no remedy.”
Additionally, it proposes that such court bans on the names of victims of offences and of witnesses, but not of accused persons who are found guilty, remain possible even after the final judgement is given, except in the case of trials by jury.
In November 2003, the lawyers of two priests and a religious brother charged with sexually abusing 11 boys at St Joseph’s Institute asked Magistrate Saviour Demicoli to order a total ban on the case, with neither the prosecution nor the victims’ lawyer opposing the plea. Only one of the boys was a minor by the time the religious had been charged.
The people inside the courtroom, including journalists, were immediately ordered to leave and the proceedings continued behind closed doors.
The ban means that the three accused religious who had been publicly named in 2003 by MaltaToday when the St Joseph’s Institute child abuse scandal broke could not be mentioned by name from then on in the press. Nor can the media broadcast any footage or publish images of the accused any longer. Their case is still ongoing.
mvella@mediatoday.com.mt
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